


I left him long ago, following you

by lapoesieestdanslarue



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, Jealous Bucky Barnes, M/M, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-18
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-03-07 07:58:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18869026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lapoesieestdanslarue/pseuds/lapoesieestdanslarue
Summary: Bucky wonders, sometimes, if he dreamt Steve up one lazy afternoon. Crafted him from his right rib, blood of my blood, bones of my bones, and breathed life into him. Bucky knows Steve, so well it goes beyond knowing and to the point of such intimate knowledge there’s nothing Bucky couldn’t know.So he knows, when he asks Steve if he loves God more than him, that he’s lying, and that Bucky will win in that match against God, this time and a hundred times over.(Steve and Bucky and the ten commandments)





	I left him long ago, following you

**Author's Note:**

> Title kindly taken from Agnes Obel's 'Run Cried The Crawling'

**i. __**_I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have any strange gods before Me_

“Do you love God more than you love me?” Bucky’s leaning against the counter, arms crossed, gazing at Steve intently. He could stare at Steve all day, if he were allowed, mapping the endlessly fascinating inner workings as they appear in the divot in his brow when he has a nasty thought, or the way he winces silently at the stitches around his black eye, or how his shoulders loosen when he’s in the sun with his eyes closed and trying to trick himself that it’s 1938 and he’s in the shithole apartment they shared in Brooklyn. 

“It’s not-- they’re _different,_ ” Steve splutters. 

Not really, though. Not very. Religion, for all intents and purposes, functions as a social construct to keep people in line since time immemorial, much the same way that Bucky has been grabbing the back of Steve’s collar since they were six years old. 

Bucky rolls his eyes. “Okay then, do you love God _as much_ as me?”

“Yes,” Steve sighs. “But still, they’re different.”

No, they’re not. “ _It’s okay,_ ” he wants to tell Steve. “ _I know you you love me more. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t get so testy._ ”

It amazes Bucky that Steve can still believe, after all the shit he’s been through. Despite it all, though, he does, with a steadfast surety. Steve tries to keep it quiet, hidden, but he should know by now that what’s his is Bucky’s and that he’s an awful secret keeper, anyways. He sees how Steve sneaks into the bathroom after a mission, beaten and bloody with the door ajar, suit half-stripped off and the gentle way he kisses the rosary around his neck, side-by-side with his dog tags and whispers “Thank you for bringing me home to him.” He feels how, before they go to sleep, Steve blesses himself and mutters thanks and praise and intentions for everyone except himself. 

Bucky wonders, sometimes, if he dreamt Steve up one lazy afternoon. Crafted him from his right rib, blood of my blood, bones of my bones, and breathed life into him. Bucky _knows_ that all he has to do is pout and ask, and Steve will do anything for him, bar none. Bucky knows Steve, so well it goes beyond knowing and to the point of such intimate knowledge there’s nothing Bucky couldn’t know. 

So he knows, when he asks Steve if he loves God more than him, that he’s lying, and that Bucky will win in that match against God, this time and a hundred times over. 

He’s Steve’s golden God, worshipped in the quiet and dark of the night. 

**ii. __** _Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain_

“Jesus _fucking_ Christ,” Steve swears, rolling his head back. “Bucky--”

“Not supposed to say that.” Bucky nips at Steve’s collarbone. “Ain’t that one of God’s rules?”

“Fucking _hell_ stop talking about God with your hand on my _dick_ —“ Bucky twists his wrist, at just the right angle that he knows Steve likes, sending the other man into a string of curses and moans. 

Is it wrong, what he’s doing? Is he Adam, tempting Eve to try the forbidden fruit? Maybe. He doesn’t know that he cares that much. And if it is wrong, then, well. He looks at the sight of Steve’s face, disheveled and unraveling beneath him, and he thinks that if God didn’t want people to taste, he shouldn’t have made it so damn delicious.

**iii. __**_Remember to keep holy the Sabbath day_

Sunday is the Holy day, the day of rest, and it’s maybe the only time Steve will slow his roll at Bucky’s pointed reminder that the Lord himself commanded it. 

“I’m pretty sure that wasn’t meant to be an excuse to laze around all day, Buck.”

Bucky trails a finger up and down Steve’s arm, ignoring him in favour of counting each freckle, cataloguing each one of them in his mind. If he created Steve, him or God or whoever, Steve is certainly the best of the best. A walking David, strong and brave and kind and true, and when he looks at you, it’s like the sun shining above your head, and only _your_ head, no one else's, a guardian angel made special for you. And when he scorns you, it’s like all the angels reigned down from on high, full of righteous fury and wings made of fire and wrath. Bucky is one of the only people living who’s never experienced this first hand, save maybe for Sam, and the everlasting memory of Sarah Rogers (may she rest in peace), but he’s seen it directed at others _because_ of him too many times to count. It’s a unique privilege to have, a lot of power to wield. 

“Stephen Grant Rogers,” he whispers, hushed, like a voice in church during worship. “Stiofán Grant MacRuairí,” again, this time in their mother tongue. 

Steve frowns, his blue eyes nearly covered beneath his dark lashes. 

“I have called you by name,” Bucky explains, remembering the book of Isaiah. “You are mine.”

Steve shifts, rolling over until he’s on his side, facing Bucky. “James Buchanan Barnes,” he says, and Bucky can’t help but smile. There’s something so sweet about the way they indulge each other, a secret made just for the two of them, in a world where so little is held back. “Séamas Buchanan Ó Bearáin.” He presses a kiss against Bucky’s cheeks. “You were always mine, and I was always yours. And I always will be.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Even if God told you not to?”

Steve grabs Bucky’s hand, the metal one, and kisses the palm of it, reverent. “Especially then.”

They were each other’s before they were God’s, that’s just the way it goes. That’s the way it always been. 

**iv. __**_Honor thy father and mother_

For all that Bucky is a horrible influence on Steve, Steve is just as bad on Bucky.

“Some people are born bad in the blood, baby,” his mother used to tell him from the window in their fourth-floor apartment, looking out at the rest of the Heights. She’d have a thimble of whiskey in her hand, which she’d sip with such timed perfection she’d drag the few dregs of golden liquid out for hours. The sad but learned practice of a woman who hadn’t come by pleasure in a long, long time but grasped her only vice with a fevered desperation; as if she was worried it would slip from between her fingers at any moment. 

His mother hadn’t wanted that statement to be true for him, he knows. She used it for drunks, rowdy men who lit up the streets at night with fights and revelries. She used it for his father, when he came home from work, fists already swinging. But he can’t help but remember the hollow, tired look in her eyes when she’d had to come and pick him up from school for swinging a punch at John Fincher when he had made fun of Steve’s asthma again. 

“You can understand how serious this is, Mrs. Barnes,” Sister Marjorie explained, her voice low and sombre, as if she was imparting some kind of terminal illness onto Bucky. “John has lost a tooth and suffered a severe nosebleed. We cannot condone this kind of behaviour.”

And Bucky’s mother, standing opposite them-- little Becca holding her right hand, still sucking her soother, and little Alice asleep in her arms-- weighed down by the weight of all her life’s worth, began to break, Sister Marjorie's words like the constant lash of rain, wounding, into his mother’s cocoon of pain. “Well what do you want me to do?” She’d started to cry ugly, broken sobs. “What do you want me to do with him? I did my best by him but he got his father’s temper. What can I do with that?”

Bucky sat there, in the small plastic chair and had to watch it all unfold, his cheeks heating with shame. When they were let go, his mother’s eyes were red rimmed and she was set in stoney silence. 

“I’m sorry, Ma.” His small, ten-year old voice broke the quiet. His stomach was twisted in knots; a fertile source of guilt and pain. Guilt, not necessarily for what he’d done, but what he’d put his mother through; ‘the worst birth in all of Brooklyn’ she liked to call the day of Bucky’s birth, with him making his entrance into the world both the wrong way around and the wrong sex (his mother wanted a girl), a double blunder not easily forgiven. And now, getting him near expelled for a violent streak in him he couldn’t seem to tame once provoked, saved only by his mother’s apparent desperation.

“You are never seeing Steve Rogers again, do you hear me?” She said, her voice oddly calm and quiet, but you’d have to be blind, deaf and dumb to miss the authority in her voice.

“But--”

“No ‘buts’ James Buchanan Barnes. He’s a bad influence, do you hear me? A bad, bad influence.”

“But he didn’t ask me to! He wanted me to stop! But then John--”

“Bucky,” she sighed, weary from this newest reprisal of an argument they’ve had countless times. “When are you going to stop fighting that boy’s battles for him?”

And the sour tang of pain that shot through his chest, bitter with the knowledge that he never, never would; not until the very last breath, until the end of the line. He would follow Steve into war, into the jaws of death. 

Bad in the blood he may be, but he reckons there has to be a saving grace in doing bad for someone else than doing bad for yourself. 

(He crept out his window that night, and climbed all the down the four stories and ran across half of Brooklyn before creeping into Steve’s bedroom. The other boy hadn’t needed rousing, instead got up the instant Bucky appeared, as if he’d been waiting for him (he had), and they’d both cried ten year-old tears as they hugged each other tight, and Steve made Bucky promise he’d never fight for him again, and Bucky promised Steve that he’d never stop being his friend, not ever. Even if his Ma told him to, he’d never stop. One promise was quickly broken, the other was kept.)

**v. __**_Thou shalt not kill_

Sometimes, it worries Bucky, what Steve would do for him. He doesn’t want his hands to get dirty, never has. That was always Bucky’s job, and it still doesn’t feel entirely natural that those tables have turned. 

But Steve has killed people, maybe even as many as Bucky. And he does it for the right reasons, undoubtedly he does, and most of the people he’s killed are evil bastards who wouldn’t deserve to see the light of day anyways; but it goes unnoticed by the others, or maybe they just choose not to see it. That Steve is careless-- that Bucky has made him careless. He always has, he supposes, and it’s a two way street, Steve has the same power over Bucky. He thinks of the destruction in Sokovia, and how, when he’d asked about it, Steve had just shrugged and said he wasn’t thinking much about the buildings, he just wanted it to be over so he could get back to finding Bucky. Or the havoc they wrecked when Bucky tried to escape Vienna on a plane and Steve risked his life to stop, and how he’d dragged from the water, just as Bucky had a year before. 

He thinks of a few days later, in that tower with Tony Stark, how Steve had decimated his shield trying to take Tony down. It scares him, sometimes, the ferocity with which Steve will protect him. He would kill anyone, and not ask questions. He thinks about that day, and how Steve would have killed Tony in a heartbeat, had Bucky only said the word. 

Bucky hadn’t, but sometimes he wonders about what might have happened if he had. 

(The truth is Steve spends more time these days kneeling with Bucky’s dick down his throat than he does kneeling in prayer, and sometimes Bucky reckons the two things might as well be one and the same. The truth is they spend hours worshipping with each other with hands and mouths and bodies, and everytime Steve comes for him it feels like a blessing, a gift he isn’t worthy of receiving. And the God honest truth is that Bucky created the man Steve is today, has been sculpting him from the raw materials since they were ten years old, and Bucky has the power to unmake him with a single word or action-- and he already has. Who else got Steve to abandon his duties and spend years on a wild goose chase across Europe? Who else got Steve to drop his shield, his mantle, his calling? He’s given himself over to Bucky body and soul, just as Bucky has given himself to Steve; he’s forsaken almost every vow he ever made to God and goodness simply because Bucky asked him to, and Bucky can’t even bring himself to regret it that much. He thinks about poor Sarah Rogers, how sad she’ll be not to be reunited with her boy in heaven, how sorry she’ll be that she ever let him near that Jimmy Barnes, how he ruined her little boy. 

If Steve is a sinner, then Bucky is the devil who led him from the path, but Bucky never demanded anything of Steve, and Steve took his hand willingly. If Steve is going to Hell, then Bucky will be right there with him, probably leading the way. It’s not their fault, Bucky never wanted to be a sinner, or to incite sinning. But if that’s the only way they can be together, then that’s how it is. 

He wonders if she’ll know that Steve ruined Bucky, too.)

**vi. __**_Thou shalt not commit adultery_

Bucky got pretty serious with a dame called Mary-Kate Barrett around the summer of 1935. She was a sweet little thing, about his height with broad shoulders and blonde hair, blue eyes like the sky and a perpetual smile on her face. Becca had been thrilled, she helped teach home-ec at the school and made a mean apple pie. His mother was happy because her parents came from money and lived on the East side nearer Manhattan than Brooklyn. Sarah Rogers made a point to speak to her each Sunday after mass, dragging Steve, and of course Bucky, along with her.

And when Bucky would swing by later that night for scraps off their table like some kind of alley dog (because his mother hadn’t bothered with dinner again and they just had enough in their fridge for the girls to get a good meal and Bucky sure as hell wasn’t going to let _them_ suffer for his sins) they would make polite conversation and Sarah would ask about Mary-Kate, and smile when he answered. But there was always something in her eyes that betrayed her sunny disposition, a sadness, maybe, or a knowledge that Bucky was stringing that poor girl along. He remembers that Steve had been at the table, sketching away on some commision he’d gotten, and Bucky hadn’t been able to take his eyes off of him-- so perfect there in the six o’clock light, his hair like a golden halo, his delicate artists hands dancing around the page and lips, bitten between his teeth, redder than apples. 

He couldn’t look away, until a clatter or something drew him from Steve, and the first thing his eyes had caught on were Sarah’s. She looked at him, he looked at her, and he knew. 

(Later that night, when Bucky and Mary-Kate were taking a walk he told her he was real sorry, but he didn’t think things were going to work out no more. She blinked back tears and asked him, at least, could he give her a kiss goodbye. And he did, he gave her more than a kiss goodbye (at her request), but all the while, there was the memory of Steve, his hands making artifacts in the corner of Bucky’s mind.)

**vii. __**_Thou shalt not steal_

The thing about being poor is that you never really know what it is to _be_ poor until you’re in the absolute shit of it. It was poverty, maybe, that drove him from God first, and the rest followed after when Bucky couldn’t care much about it anyways. 

He remembers looking at that medicine bottle and knowing if he did this, there would be no turning back. He’d hesitated, for a moment. Then he thought about Steve hacking up both lungs at home, and then the shop clerk’s back had turned, and then, well. 

But what was he supposed to do? Let his best friend die? Let his sisters starve? If it was him that caused it, if it was him that was the curse on them, then it should be up to him to fix it. And so what if God didn’t like it? He was sick of paying for the sins of his father when he could fix it so easily. 

That line that he crossed that day, it changed him forever. He knew, then, that there was nothing that he wouldn’t do for Steve, for his sisters, for the ones he loved. He didn’t care how illegal, how immoral it was. He was their protector, their keeper. Screw God, he did a better job than Him any day of the week.

**viii. __**_Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor_

In the beginning there was the Word, and the word dwelt among us and was full of grace of truth, and the Word was “I can do this all day, pal.”

For all that Bucky tried, Steve never could keep his damn big nose out of things if he could help it. Which is how, on a Sunday morning as they were making their way over to Trinity church, after some dumbbell called them a fag, Steve is lying in the alley corner nursing a swollen lip and a black eye. 

“You idiot,” Bucky swears. “I said I got it, didn’t I?”

“Didn’t want you to have all the fun,” Steve quips, before spitting blood on the ground.

The church bells toll, and Bucky checks his watch, and sighs. “Well, we missed Mass.”

Steve grins up at him, squinting. “Like you care.”

Bucky huffs a laugh. “Yeah, that’s true. C’mon, we go home and get you sorted before your Ma does worse.”

Sarah Rogers had stormed in, guns blazing, took one look at Steve and nearly hit the roof. Steve had opened his mouth to interject before Bucky stepped in. “We’re real sorry, Missus Rogers, but I needed to drop home to collect the girls and when we were comin’ down the stairs, Steve tripped on Allycat’s shoelaces, and, whaddya know, he went flying.” He put on his best sorry face, the lie dripping easy off his tongue. “I’m just glad he hit the bannister to break his fall and didn’t lose a tooth.” 

Sarah huffed and puffed for a few more minutes before she gave up, and just scolded them for missing mass, and shooed them out to the evening one. Sitting in one of the back pews, Steve whispers, furious, “I can’t believe you told my mother I fell down the stairs. You think she’s an idiot?”

“Well what did you want me to tell her?” Bucky shoots back. “That we got called queers? What kind of question do you think that would raise, huh? ‘Well what were you doing boys?’ ‘Where were you walking, boys?’”

“You got something against queers, Bucky Barnes?”

Bucky sighs. “You know I don’t Steve. Jesus Christ I just wanted to make life easier for you.”

“I can fight my own battles,” Steve says definitely, jutting his chin out.

“I know you can, babydoll.” It’s said as a joke, but Bucky doesn’t miss the way Steve’s cheeks flame red, and it makes him smile the whole night through.

**ix. __**_Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife_

Bucky got into a bad habit, late in ‘37, where somehow or another he’d end up with whatever dame Steve had at the minute. It was bad, he knows, and what’s worse is that usually he picked them out knowing Steve would _hate_ them and wouldn’t want to kiss them anyways. Steve never found out, until one night a few years later a week or two before he shipped out, at some goddamn dance hall he heard it from Betty Ross that Gina Goodman says that Bucky Barnes walked Molly-Rose home the other night and he gave her a midnight kiss!

Steve had been livid, and it was maybe the first time Bucky ever came close to feeling that brunt of that anger. 

“Why’d you kiss her?” Steve demanded once Bucky walked in the door. “I can’t believe you, I--”

Bucky sighs, resting against the door. Maybe it’s the whiskey, maybe it’s the heat of the night or maybe it’s just a dying man’s last words while can that make him say, “She has your lips.”

Steve falters. “I-- What?”

“Your lips, Stevie. You never noticed? Blonde hair, blue eyes. You like brunettes, you said so yourself. You never noticed?” Bucky is staring at him, challenging. 

“You kissed her ‘cause she looks like me?” He asks, his voice small and all the fight suddenly gone out of him.

“I kissed her ‘cause I can’t kiss you.” He steps closer. Steve doesn’t move. One more step. Steve still doesn’t move. “I can’t kiss you. Do you know what that’s done to me, all these years?”

Steve stares at him, his pupils blown. It feels like an eternity, and then he says, “Who says you can’t?”

Bucky’s eyes, briefly, flicker to the portrait of the Sacred Mother on the wall. Steve’s follow, but then he looks at Bucky’s lips, and Bucky again. 

Bucky smiles, and leans in. 

**x. __**_Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods_

Bucky wraps the chain around his fingers, Metal on Metal, once, twice, three times. He unravels it, and then wraps it once again.

It was an obsession he’d formed during his time in the war, swapping their dog chains and using Steve’s like a child’s toy. But it brought an unimaginable wealth of comfort, and it still does. His, of course, have been lost to time, likely one of the first things destroyed in an attempt to remove him from himself. It hadn’t worked. Steve made sure it hadn’t worked. 

The bed dips under the weight of a new body-- Steve’s-- as he lies down beside him and rolls over, breathing in Bucky, his arm thrown across his waist and face buried in his neck. 

“You still do that?”

Bucky nods, turning his head to kiss Steve’s forehead. “Why don’t you wear them?”

“They don’t fit under the uniform,” Steve explains. “Plus I got so used to wearing yours…”

“Can I keep these, then?” Bucky asks, winding and unwinding absentmindedly. 

Steve snorts. “You’d take them even if I said no.”

“I’ll keep them for you,” Bucky grins. “Safe, until you come home.”

“I know you will.”

He turns, bringing Steve closer, cradling his head and stroking his head.

“I wish I could keep you safe,” Bucky whispers. “I wish you wouldn’t keep running into wars that aren’t yours to fight.” He understands now what his mother might have felt, but this is different. Desperately, they cling to each other, as Bucky yearns for nothing else but for Steve to come home really and truly. 

“I’m nearly done, I promise,” Steve says, hushed. 

“Give the shield to Sam, or someone. Someone who’ll do good, someone who deserves it. Then come home to me, sweets.”

“So we can live our life in sin like you always wanted?”

Bucky chuckles. “See, now you got it.”

It’s selfish, maybe, what he’s doing. Stealing Steve away, stowing him underboard where nothing can ever harm him. But they protect each other, it’s what they do. Steve did the same, when it was Bucky. Now it’s his turn. 

The world could crash and burn, and he wouldn't care. Once he’s got Steve, that’s all that matters. And seeing as God can’t seem to give the guy a break, it’s up to Bucky to intervene.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this, why not consider dropping me a comment or following me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/buchannanrogers)?


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